A Design Theory for Architectural Coordination of Enterprise Transformations (ACET)

Present day enterprises are confronted with a continuously changing
environment. These changes are due to globalisation, new
technologies, regulations, novel business models, etc. Enterprises
therefore need to transform themselves regularly to meet these new
challenges, while senior management of these enterprises needs to
make conscious decisions about the future design of
“their” enterprise and the path to “get
there”. Such transformations may range from changes in value
propositions and business processes, via changes to the information
systems used to support the business processes, to changes of the
underlying IT infrastructures. Since most real world transformations
are large, they need to be divided into smaller programs and
projects. This raises the need for a coordination mechanism between
smaller programs and projects to safeguard that all contribute
towards the strategic goals set for the transformation as a whole.

Traditional project/programme management does not provide such
coordination, as it focuses on typical project parameters such as
budgets, resource use, deadlines, etc. As a result, projects are
“invited” to conduct local, project specific
optimizations. As a consequence, the results of these projects may
actually not contribute to (or even hamper) the overall
transformation goals. It has been the mission of the field of
enterprise architecture to provide such coordination mechanisms.
Ample research has been conducted on different elements of
enterprise architecture, such as: frameworks, modelling languages,
model analysis, etc. Each of these elements is a valuable component
to set up an effective coordination mechanism for enterprise
transformations. However, how to combine these elements into an
effective method support for architectural coordination of
transformations, has not received much research attention yet.

The challenge, which the ACET project aims to meet, is the
development of a theoretically grounded methodology that is an
effective means for architectural coordination of enterprise
transformations. Due to the diversity of contexts and goals in
enterprise transformation, this methodology needs to be
systematically adaptable to the situation at hand, e.g. industry,
size of the company, or dominant organizational culture. In doing
so, the ACET project will primarily focus on the so-called
Business-to-IT stack. In other words, the layered series of aspects:
business strategy, business processes, information processing, and
the underlying IT infrastructure.